Walmart Goodies: Surprise Yourself!

Walmart has entered the subscription game with Goodies Co. With a subscription fee of $7 users get a package of sweets and snacks every month. As usual they are playing on price. Ravi Raj, VP of Products for @WalmartLabs says that the actual worth of the pack is close to $15. I believe it much more than that. Let me explain it to you in detail.

Subscription services are services where users pay a monthly fee, usually $15-$30 to companies. The companies (with products ranging from food, fashion accessories, kid’s toys, apparels and crafts) send a box of goodies to these users in return. The contents of the box are mostly unknown to the users.

Why do we do it? The reason is very simple. Most of us find a lot of pleasure in surprises. It has been scientifically established that the nucleas accumbens (the area of the brain identified as a pleasure center) responds very strongly to the unexpectedness of a sequence of stimuli. Hence we find more pleasure in unexpected pleasures than expected ones.

This increases the perceived value of the box even than what it actually is. It hardly matters if we want those products or not. We might not even consider those products when we see them on the shelves in the super market. Ultimately, we end up paying for the products which we might have not even wanted. But we find pleasure in those same products when they are sent to us every month.